I can't believe it is July

Today in Cork it is wet and gray but I feel peaceful. I went into the bookstore and looked at some nice books. Tom read a short story by Guy de Maupassant to me this morning in the kitchen, and I really liked it. I imagined printing and illustrating this little story, which is probably rarely found by anyone anymore. It was about two men in Paris who don't really know each other except that they spent the last warm season fishing in the same spot outside the city. They talked very little then, only the occasional comment on the weather which was understood to mean ''I couldn't be happier here doing this.'' Then Paris becomes occupied by the Prussians and one day the men run into one another in a street. They go to have a drink together, and then another, and decide to go fishing, despite the occupation. They walk out together to their spot and begin to fish, catching lots of little silver fish and talking about the madness of war, when they are caught and taken to see a Prussian general in a nearby cabin. He accuses them of being spies and informs them they will be dead in five minutes if they don't tell him their secret password. They say nothing. He tries again, with each individually, but they say nothing. They say goodbye to each other and are both shot, one falling on top of the other. They are dumped into the river where they caught their fish.

When I left the house, Alan was over listening to Tom playing ''Blue Skies'' on the guitar in his room. Alan looked very peaceful too, holding a mug of coffee with his old-fashioned black hat on. Rizla was sleeping next to the little stove that Tom lit even though it isn't cold out. He says it keeps the wetness out and cheers him up.

Spoke on the phone with everyone last night and it was very nice. I would like to have a day on the beach in Destin, even if it is a million degrees. I had just gotten back from Dublin, which I still don't like very much. But I made a couple of new friends there and enjoyed some pints.

Looking forward to Jordan coming to Cork tomorrow or Saturday. Not sure what to show her in this little town, but I think we will have a nice time. Should we go and kiss the Blarney Stone?

- - -
Thinking of Ron...

Where Did That Naughty Little Flea Go?

(Tom this morning was showing me youtube clips of Miriam Makeba, that's where this title comes from, a nice little number by South African singer)

so hello, I am back!
Back from very many places. The Camino de Santiago, the end of the world, the end of my nine month's trip (which ended and didn't end), a short (short) stay stateside. I am back in Cork, for the third ('turd' here) time. Turd time's a charm. And Michael Jackson is dead. Aye, dios mio.

I am living in a house eight minutes' walk from the center of Cork City. My housemates are Tom, Alix, and Gerry. Alix is twenty-two, french, born in the south of France and raised mostly in Paris. She has been living in Cork for the last nine months (yeah we like to do things in lengths of gestation) and is going back to France on Sunday. She sings with one of the most stunning voices you've ever heard. She and Tom play most Tuesday nights in a pub called the Castle Inn, and when she took the guitar and started singing there the other night, everyone stopped what they were doing and forgot what they were saying. To just listen to her. It seems a normal enough thing, but people seemed to stop in a way they'd never stopped before. To listen. Her friend wove long braids into her hair for eighteen hours so that when she travels down into Spain and Portugal and Morocco this summer, she won't have to worry about it. The first night I met her, she was with the gypsy band I fell in love with, sitting in the red common room of the house with all its books and paintings and wooden chairs and old cushions, and she was singing Elliot Smith's Between the Bars, in this smoky voice but she had to read the words from the paper because she can't remember them all. In the Castle Inn she forgot the words and kept repeating the line

''well I'm seeing you there, with your hands in the air
waiting to finally be caught''

She studied philosophy, my beautiful friend, and she has beautiful thoughts in her head. Mostly we understand each other without talking very much. It's Tom who does most of the talking. He is a strapping and pleasant Irish fellow of thirty-two, not from Cork but some small town somewhere. He has been living in Cork for a while, and the house is brimming with his ideas. He has tons of books, old books, in languages he can't necessarily read, paintings done on cardboard, collected little items (postcards, figurines), records, things that have been fixed, patched, pieced together, pieces of things waiting to be used for something, dust and the occasional bumblebee. Musical instruments! A seventeen-year-old cat named Rizla who slept on my bed the first night and to whom I am miraculously minimally allergic. Tom plays the guitar and sings, just like everyone else but me. But I am learning to sing and be happy anyway. Gerry is the music student anyway, or he just graduated university with a degree in music. I don't know him yet, he is usually not around. But we did sit outside yesterday noon when we'd all woken up and Tom made coffee and porridge and read me the crossword clues on a blanket in the yard. That's when he told Gerry who was sitting in the shade with a hat and sunglasses that he looked like Michael Jackson. And this was, obviously, before anyone know that Michael Jackson was dead. He wasn't dead yet.

The other evening after I spent the day in town, set up my cell phone and everything, we took bikes down to a little field by the river. There was a small herd of horses we passed on the way out, a tiny little foal not more than a month old I think that ran right across our path, a lovely little piebald, which is a type of pinto according to the crossword. Tom and Tom (a Scottish artist who makes painting after painting of clowns in a Danielle Steel book whose pages he primed for water pastels) went swimming and Alix and I ate strawberries. We played with a little soccer ball, I looked at Tom's art, listened to them playing music, and we ate a picnic and went into town as it was getting dark, had a pint in the pub where I saw Txutxukan play the last time two weeks ago.

We went to The Roundy again last night. There was a band of four women playing various kinds of folk music, although for one song a man from the audience joined them and sang Shalom Aleichem, which was totally random. I understand a Catholic country slightly better after the Camino. And what else? Outside, just after we heard about Michael, we saw a group of four or five people our age reading a play out loud, wearing costumes, just for fun. We joined them. I played Soldier 3, Tom was Soldier 1, and Alix took pictures because she says she can't read English so well. I can't remember the play or anything I was reading. Tom has a really nice anthology of poetry called Staying Alive, and he and I have been reading to each other from it. The house is full of music and poetry! I am learning about all the jazz greats from the thirties and forties, watching really pleasing old video clips of them on Tom's computer at night before bed. And this morning of course was spent watching Billie Jean, Thriller, old ones of the Jackson 5 when Michael was so little but already his body was starting to move in that funny way that he seemed to have no control over, and some of the news casts.

Last night in the bathroom of another pub, there was a really drunk girl who came out of the stalls crying, a bit wild. She kept saying ''You don't know, I miss him, I can't explain to you, I just love Michael so much, my boyfriend is jealous because I am so upset.'' On and on, uncontrollable sobbing. Alix kind of looked at her and was like, ''Do you want a hug?''

It is good to be here. I am not sure how long I will stay in Cork. For the moment, I have a nice room to myself. Tom's cousin Rosie is in Portugal until the end of July, so I am staying in her place, a big room with wooden floors, big windows looking over the city, her clothes on every available surface, lots of books, big bed, cat. Not a bad setup, all in all. Summer. The weather has been really wonderful, hot and sunny, and today I was even glad to have a cloudier day. I could use a little rain, but not too much.

I am thinking of everyone and feel that I am not so far away, like before. I will miss being at the beach in Destin this weekend. I will miss fourth of July things. But I have free calling to the states and am, like, so connected. You will be hearing from me.


Happy Birthday Hulia :)

Santiago backwards

the good way

Today was the eighth day of walking on the Camino. All day long I kept thinking of Jewish holidays. We went alongside a chainlink fence for maybe half a kilometer, and all along it was chock-full of crosses made out of twigs and random bits of Camino debris. Did I mention this is a primarily Catholic walk? We tried to make a spiral out of twigs, but, ah this isn´t what I want to say at all but I don´t know how to describe this thing.

Camino de Santiago.

It was the shortest day so far, in terms of kilometers. Only thirteen, but we spread them out, coughingly and limpingly spread them out so that we ended up coughing and limping into Navarrete at about the same time as the people who left from Viana, the town about nine kilometers before our starting point, the city Logroño. Jenny is coming down with a cold and I have a bum left knee (Dad, some tips please) and so this is why. Jenny--I call her Zhenya--was born in the Ukraine but grew up in Ottawa, she studies insects, particularly butterflies, and we met on the train to St. Jean Pied de Port. She was eating cherry tomatoes and I was eating a panini, and we have been together almost continuously since then. Most of the time we are talking about food (today´s topic: Russian foods her grandparents are going to cook for me when I go one day in the future to visit them in Canada), or eating food. I prepared myself to walk the path alone, really, but so far it only makes sense to walk with Zhenya.

And we have met so many others, it is like the Canterbury Tales. There is Genevieve the beautiful older French woman who bops along with her pack always a little askew, talking to everyone rapidly in French, about alternative routes they might want to take, whether or not we think there is a good supermercado in the next village, or how steep the next climb will be. We shared some peanuts with her early on and ever since she has been our comrade, offering to share her tuna pasta (exactly what it sounds like) with us or pay for our hot chocolates. Then there is Annie, an actress from LA who is one of the leading characters in a documentary that is being filmed of the pilgrims. Zhenya and I have been interviewed a few times by her crew, but generally it´s Zhenya talking and me kind of awkwardly nodding and wishing I had more time to think.

Maybe this will help. Here is a map of the Camino.

We are now just past Logroño, and not quite to Najera. We started in France, in St. Jean Pied de Port. Last Thursday, on the most beautiful day we´ve had so far, we walked through the Pyrenees into Spain. It was a long upward-tending walk, but beautiful. Zhenya told me things about bugs, we lay in the grass because she says this is a good way of being in a place and it was true, and we edged through the muddy snow sometimes pointing at the trees that grow horizontally out from the hills and played twenty questions and sometimes didn´t say anything and sometimes didn´t even think anything. At Roncesvalles, there was a Pilgrims´ Mass in the church, where the priest said a prayer we didn´t understand, for all the pilgrims that were at the beginning of their journey. Or peregrinos, which is what we are in Spain. Each day, except today, we have walked somewhere between twenty and thirty kilometers, stopping at nights in towns fully equipped for peregrinos, with hostels called Albergues that have sometimes eighty or a hundred beds in a big room. Earplugs have become my most prized possession. We buy food along the way and stop to have picnic lunches each day, usually grainy bread, piquante chorizo, cheese, fresh or dried fruit, and the cheapest chocolatey packaged cookies we can get our hands on. At nights we cook in the albergue kitchen, share a bottle of the local red wine (now it is Rioja!), check in with the people we keep running into and meet the new ones, and talk about intentions for the next day.

[Zhenya just asked if ailments is spelled like that or like alements, and we decided that we will now trade in the first for the second, which fits in perfectly with talk of cheap Spanish wine...]

Then there is the French man with the little heart stickers on his wristwatch, saying it´s either hearts or it´s darkness in life, you can choose either hearts or darkness. We were in Larrasoaña and one of a trio of German girls had just burst into tears at the computer and we were eating peanuts with Annie and a French Canadian boy who only brought one pair of underwear but made room for a dictionary of Swahili because he wants to go to Africa, and the French man, who had been walking with his friend for a month already from Arles, also said you must stop and take a shower to changer des pensees. The next day in the morning when it was uncertain whether it would rain or not, we walked briefly with a Danish man for whom it was not the shower but the war in Yugoslavia that changed his thoughts. We are among the youngest on the Camino, I think this is generally because universities are still in session and the weather is optimal for older folks, and everyone we meet is teaching something.

Then there is the Australian guy Glen who first thing in a new town sits down in the nearest cafe and gets a cold beer from the tap. He says you can look at the Camino as a very extended pub crawl.

We have to get to the store before it closes, so I end this here. I will say that I am content here, doing this. Tomorrow we will get up and walk to Azofra, and I really can´t think of a better way to pass the day...

Following in the steps of Greatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreatgreat Grandpa

He also didn't keep a blog very well.

I survived meditation and earthquakes. Worked on a very small farm north of Rome with an Italian woman named Lucia, but only briefly because...

it was suddenly time to go to Austria. Julia wrote to say she would be there. I wrote to say I would be there. We ate many EASTER SNACKS! The German term for it is way better. Easter snacks means mostly meat, which before being consumed is put into baskets, which are brought to the little church and blessed by the priest, who makes strangely jolly jokes about Jesus coming to eat meat with everybody. Or something like that, it was in German so maybe nothing like that.

I am in Vienna with Maria now and this is also wonderful

What I mean about old Henry Samson, who sailed upon the Mayflower, is not that he was inept at future information technologies or even that he ultimately facilitated the bringing into the world of someone called Ebenezer and someone else called Dorcas, but that he was a pilgrim. And I will like to be one too. But I guess a Puritan great-times-nine-or-something grandfather wouldn't exactly endorse a great-times-nine-or-something granddaughter who is desiring to embark on one of the most Catholic of all pilgrimages, the Camino de Santiago. Especially if she's a the daughter of a Jew. Hrm.

Yes! This small southern puritan jew is going to walk the Camino. In fact, I leave Vienna for France in just a few hours, and I hope that by Friday I will already be walking up and over those Pyrenees Mountains I keep bumping into. I will try to update the blog, really and truly, because I know there really won't be time now for emails and gchats and all that. I am excited about this last part of my journey. I am even going to buy a real nice walking stick, mmhmmmm.....

Disappearing with Warning

Tomorrow I exit the Iberian Peninsula, finally. Catalyunia is here, holding me for the last few days. A good friend and his family who treated me like family and not just because they have a son my age who is also traveling, a renewed farmhouse with a little sheep locked up in it, green slopes and tractor trails to walk on, homemade queso fresco, a baby goose hatched in an incubator in the bathroom. The Pyrenees have snow on them, in the distance, I woke up more than three months ago on a train from Paris with the sun coming over their white sides and the air very frosty. I go to Italy tomorrow.

I thought I would have been in France or Italy ages ago. Tomorrow the names Bologna, Faenza. Ten days of silence at the Dhamma Atala Vipassana centre, spelled that way. I don´t know why I feel the need this time to signal a mere ten days of disappearing. I have vanished from this page for much longer before. But oh well. I am tired of constant disappearing! Missing the people who know me best does this. I want you to know where I am. Or in case I don´t survive the silence. In case they find a wild woman screaming in the woods on Sunday, unable to take it anymore. But actually....I am sure I will do just fine there. It isn´t the silence that scares me, but...the painful learning of patience....something like that.

Well anyway. See you in Firenze at the end of the month. Ciao a tutti

ghosts of the posts that weren't made, part one

I bought a ghost-white camera in Gibraltar, where Aaron and I went for a few days back in mid-January. Gibraltar is a cross between a slightly backwoods small British town and the duty free section of the airport, the main street lined with shops selling huge cartons of cigarettes, discounted liquor, perfumes, and electronics. It belongs to Britain but lives at the tip of Spain, with a big ugly jutting-up rock from the top of which you can see the mountains of Morocco, and also monkeys. We stayed in a hotel in La Linea, Spain, and walked across the border to England and back each day. La Linea had much better nightlife, one elephant, no monkeys.